In the last few years at the large corporation I worked in, I was constantly berated to hire more women. This was an engineering gig. I hardly ever got resumes from women but we eventually hired one. She was almost net negative. Eventually I reported to a clueless woman executive and suddenly all the competent engineers we getting outsourced by a new Indian woman. It was criminal. Eventually everyone was let go and the jobs moved offshore.
Great points, well-written and all true. The biggest challenge now is, do people even care enough to resist? Market capitalism, even if one sees that as an objective good, hasn’t been around in the big picture for better than a century, and the Constitution has not applied since at least the War between the States. What conservatives are “conserving” at this point is a slow death to real freedom and Truth, at best. I think the American Experiment is playing out exactly as is to be expected given the principles it embodies: the Naturalism of the French Revolution. As Belloc pointed out, the only two options which will prevail are either a re-establishment of Christendom, or the descent back into the pagan Servile State. Choose your loyalty wisely: City of God or City of Man.
Starting to better understand your point about the borderline oxymoron of an actual right wing in the world created by the French Rev. Have you read de Maistre? I'm looking to get introduced to him this summer.
Have not read him, at least not at length (maybe some quotations). Interesting quote I found in wiki re: his writing/style:
Although a political opponent, Alphonse de Lamartine called him the "Plato of the Alps".[51] Admiring the splendour of his prose, Lamartine stated:
"That brief, nervous, lucid style, stripped of phrases, robust of limb, did not at all recall the softness of the eighteenth century, nor the declamations of the latest French books: it was born and steeped in the breath of the Alps; it was virgin, it was young, it was harsh and savage; it had no human respect, it felt its solitude; it improvised depth and form all at once ... That man was new among the enfants du siècle [children of the century]."[52]
To your point we must be wise boldly standing our ground opposing progressive ideologies wisely, then ever more wisely as circumstances and situation avail themselves. As St Thomas taught our greatest kindness is sharing the truth (graciously).
Yes, the circumstances will help determine the proper course of action. There is no one-size-fits-all approach here, but the path forward must be guided by a) truth and b) a desire for the good of others. Many people will say this looks like "intolerance"--but oh well!
It’s true that we do have some options but no lazy and complacent ones. Those kinds of things (surefire solutions that require the minimum from us) have a way of working against us.
If you’re not going to sign on to ESG your company is over because your financing and loans will be cut off. But that strenuous multilevel thinking is too difficult for most.
Also: that market efficiency can encourage moral laziness is a very important point. If you have a panglossian belief that everything would be for the best in the best of all possible worlds if only government would get out of the way, well I tried to be a hero? Your moral worldview doesn't really have room for that category.
But it's not true. Market of capitalism is wonderful and well worth celebrating, much better than the alternatives, but no social order or set of institutions comes close to being a substitute for virtue. There are a million ways that capitalism degenerates If the people who inhabit it aren't brave, just, prudent, loving, faithful, etc.
The numerous "market failure" cases that are covered in standard textbooks are good entry points to understanding where capitalism needs to be supplemented by virtue.
Of course, economists have a silly old conceit of pretending that people are "rational, self-interested agents, animated only by greed." That's ultimately inessential, But custom has so saturated the economic way of thinking with that silly and corrupting assumption that it would take something of an intellectual revolution to reimagine capitalism without it. I know how. I could carry out that intellectual revolution if I had the right readership to make it worthwhile. But in the meantime, it is a little hard to know what to recommend for how people without the training to do that should think about these things.
So I disagree strongly with some of this, but let me first focus on common ground.
You're on the right track in your manner of dismissing "go woke, go broke," and it's worth distilling some of the principles in play.
First, the paradigm is perfectly competitive. Markets is often wrong simply because the actual capitalist economy has more concentration than that. In a certain kind of economic theory, individual firms have to obey the dictates of demand because they're forever operating against cutthroat competition, and any deviation makes them go bankrupt and disappear. But actually oligopoly is more typical than anything resembling perfect competition. And the reason is pretty simple: economies of scale. Big firms have inherent efficiencies which give them leeway to resist market discipline. This operates at many levels. Hollywood producers aren't perfectly competitive, investment capital isn't perfectly competitive, and I assume there are a lot of other foci of market power in play. Navigating these can be as important to success as satisfying the ultimate customer.
Second, economists tend to assume that there's a market for everything, capitalism is infinitely creative and never suffers from failure of imagination. But that's not the case. Realistically, opportunities are missed all the time. That's especially true when the scale of an activity is so gigantic that the vast majority of people have no hope of doing it. It's easy to rule out the possibility that Hollywood producers miss out on profitable projects just because they're too dumb to see what the public would want. But I'm confident that that's the case. Of course, they're dumb in a particular way because they're blinded by inhabiting a particular cultural bubble.
In the last few years at the large corporation I worked in, I was constantly berated to hire more women. This was an engineering gig. I hardly ever got resumes from women but we eventually hired one. She was almost net negative. Eventually I reported to a clueless woman executive and suddenly all the competent engineers we getting outsourced by a new Indian woman. It was criminal. Eventually everyone was let go and the jobs moved offshore.
And if your CEO didn't do comply, Fink and Co would find a replacement who was more eager for "forcing behaviors."
Great points, well-written and all true. The biggest challenge now is, do people even care enough to resist? Market capitalism, even if one sees that as an objective good, hasn’t been around in the big picture for better than a century, and the Constitution has not applied since at least the War between the States. What conservatives are “conserving” at this point is a slow death to real freedom and Truth, at best. I think the American Experiment is playing out exactly as is to be expected given the principles it embodies: the Naturalism of the French Revolution. As Belloc pointed out, the only two options which will prevail are either a re-establishment of Christendom, or the descent back into the pagan Servile State. Choose your loyalty wisely: City of God or City of Man.
Starting to better understand your point about the borderline oxymoron of an actual right wing in the world created by the French Rev. Have you read de Maistre? I'm looking to get introduced to him this summer.
Have not read him, at least not at length (maybe some quotations). Interesting quote I found in wiki re: his writing/style:
Although a political opponent, Alphonse de Lamartine called him the "Plato of the Alps".[51] Admiring the splendour of his prose, Lamartine stated:
"That brief, nervous, lucid style, stripped of phrases, robust of limb, did not at all recall the softness of the eighteenth century, nor the declamations of the latest French books: it was born and steeped in the breath of the Alps; it was virgin, it was young, it was harsh and savage; it had no human respect, it felt its solitude; it improvised depth and form all at once ... That man was new among the enfants du siècle [children of the century]."[52]
Sounds like he would be a great read.
To your point we must be wise boldly standing our ground opposing progressive ideologies wisely, then ever more wisely as circumstances and situation avail themselves. As St Thomas taught our greatest kindness is sharing the truth (graciously).
Yes, the circumstances will help determine the proper course of action. There is no one-size-fits-all approach here, but the path forward must be guided by a) truth and b) a desire for the good of others. Many people will say this looks like "intolerance"--but oh well!
Least we forget that the money box is only but one of the boxes that we have at our disposal to resist the progressive world view.
It’s true that we do have some options but no lazy and complacent ones. Those kinds of things (surefire solutions that require the minimum from us) have a way of working against us.
Larry Fink: “We’re going to enforce behavior.”
We should believe him!
It's an open threat.
If you’re not going to sign on to ESG your company is over because your financing and loans will be cut off. But that strenuous multilevel thinking is too difficult for most.
Exactamente
Also: that market efficiency can encourage moral laziness is a very important point. If you have a panglossian belief that everything would be for the best in the best of all possible worlds if only government would get out of the way, well I tried to be a hero? Your moral worldview doesn't really have room for that category.
But it's not true. Market of capitalism is wonderful and well worth celebrating, much better than the alternatives, but no social order or set of institutions comes close to being a substitute for virtue. There are a million ways that capitalism degenerates If the people who inhabit it aren't brave, just, prudent, loving, faithful, etc.
The numerous "market failure" cases that are covered in standard textbooks are good entry points to understanding where capitalism needs to be supplemented by virtue.
Of course, economists have a silly old conceit of pretending that people are "rational, self-interested agents, animated only by greed." That's ultimately inessential, But custom has so saturated the economic way of thinking with that silly and corrupting assumption that it would take something of an intellectual revolution to reimagine capitalism without it. I know how. I could carry out that intellectual revolution if I had the right readership to make it worthwhile. But in the meantime, it is a little hard to know what to recommend for how people without the training to do that should think about these things.
Trying to understand your main point here.
So I disagree strongly with some of this, but let me first focus on common ground.
You're on the right track in your manner of dismissing "go woke, go broke," and it's worth distilling some of the principles in play.
First, the paradigm is perfectly competitive. Markets is often wrong simply because the actual capitalist economy has more concentration than that. In a certain kind of economic theory, individual firms have to obey the dictates of demand because they're forever operating against cutthroat competition, and any deviation makes them go bankrupt and disappear. But actually oligopoly is more typical than anything resembling perfect competition. And the reason is pretty simple: economies of scale. Big firms have inherent efficiencies which give them leeway to resist market discipline. This operates at many levels. Hollywood producers aren't perfectly competitive, investment capital isn't perfectly competitive, and I assume there are a lot of other foci of market power in play. Navigating these can be as important to success as satisfying the ultimate customer.
Second, economists tend to assume that there's a market for everything, capitalism is infinitely creative and never suffers from failure of imagination. But that's not the case. Realistically, opportunities are missed all the time. That's especially true when the scale of an activity is so gigantic that the vast majority of people have no hope of doing it. It's easy to rule out the possibility that Hollywood producers miss out on profitable projects just because they're too dumb to see what the public would want. But I'm confident that that's the case. Of course, they're dumb in a particular way because they're blinded by inhabiting a particular cultural bubble.